Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

OUR PEARL LIGHT lived in 12-packs resting on the floor to the right of our cream-colored Kenmore
fridge. Reaching inside that cardboard box gave me a bad thrill, like sinking my hands into a vat of
warm wax. All that carbonated joy rumbling around my fingertips.
My mother often stored a half-empty can in the fridge to drink over the course of an evening. She
would stuff a rubber stopper that looked like a lime wedge in the mouth.
This was 1981, and we were always dreaming up new ways to keep our carbonated beverages
from going flat. My mother’s older sister informed us if you crunched the big plastic soda bottle
before you tightened the cap, you could preserve the carbonation. Our soda bottles looked like they’d
taken a flight on an airplane: sunken bellies, cratered at each side. The rubber stoppers were part of
this scheme to prolong shelf life, though they never worked. The fizz leaked out anyway. You would
come back to your can the next day and find it flat and syrupy. Eventually those lime wedges ended up
in a kitchen drawer alongside twisties and dead batteries, another failed experiment in fighting the
way of the world.
But when I began stealing sips of my mother’s beer, we still had faith in the lime wedges. I would
pop that sucker out and take a few glugs—not enough to be obvious but enough to get melty inside—
and I would put the can back exactly where I found it. On the door side, next to the raspberry jam. On
the top shelf, beside the cantaloupe, logo facing the back.
I didn’t do this every day. I didn’t even do this every month. It was a special-occasion indulgence.
A splurge. But I did it for many years, as the 12-pack grew into the economy 18-pack from Sam’s
Wholesale and cotton nightgowns turned into striped pajama bottoms and Duran Duran T-shirts.
Sometimes I went too far, because the beer was like a wave I wanted to keep crashing into. I
would misjudge a few swigs and realize the can was nearly empty. I couldn’t put my mother’s Pearl
Light back in the fridge with nothing but backwash in it.
So I had to drain that can and pop open a new one, drinking it down to the original level, which
made me woozy with rainbows. I would take the empty back to my bedroom and shove it behind the
foldout chair in the corner until I could slip out to the alley and dump it in someone else’s trash.
It’s odd I was never caught. Sometimes my mother noticed her beer lower than when she left it, but
she wrote it off to a fluke of memory. And my father kept his eyes on my brother—who was, literally,
a Boy Scout. Any con man depends on people looking in the wrong direction, but perhaps nothing
worked more to my advantage than gender bias. Nobody thought a little girl would steal beer.
I WAS IN fourth grade when I began to realize my family might be out of our league in the
neighborhood. One afternoon, a friend’s father was driving me home when he asked, “Does your dad
rent that house?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Innnnteresting,” he said, in a way that told me it was not interesting but shameful.
There are moments you can taste your difference, like copper on your tongue. I began lying after
that. Little lies, lies no one could catch. Yes, I’ve been to Aspen. No, that’s not our car. Absolutely
I’ve been accepted to the School of Performing Arts in New York. When people asked where my
father worked, I named the building but not the profession. “He’s a banker?” And I said, “I guess so.”
Banking was a power career. Banking meant money.